The effect of tourism on teleconnected ecosystem services and urban sustainability: An emergy approach

•Urban tourism intensifies cities’ dependence on external resources.•Tourism drives urban land teleconnections in distant resource-supplying areas.•Urban sustainability assessments must consider impacts of urban land teleconnections on distant areas.•Tourism planning and management should be a core element of urban planning. Tourism plays an increasingly critical role in national and urban economies. While tourist spending particularly benefits urban economies, the growth of urban tourism has gradually intensified cities’ reliance on external resources and significantly influenced resource-supplying areas. This study adopts the concept of urban land teleconnections (ULTs) to discuss how the cultural ecosystem services in the tourism industry have affected distant areas in general and how the increased tourist flow has intensified Taipei's dependence on external resources and challenged its urban sustainability in particular. An emergy-based analysis is conducted to evaluate the contribution of material flows triggered by urban tourism into the urban ecological-economic system and to demonstrate how urban tourism has increased the city's reliance on external distant areas. The analysis highlights the biophysical value created by external resources in the economic system. Driven by growing urban tourism during 2000–2016, Taipei witnessed considerable material inflow, including construction materials for newly built hotels, gasoline for sightseeing buses, food for tourists, and money through retail consumption. These material inflows are converted into emergy flows to analyze the effects of tourism-driven material flows on urban sustainability. The results show that emergy inflows driven by urban tourism considerably increased the flow of construction materials needed to build hotels to meet tourists’ accommodation needs. As a result, the total emergy driven by Taipei tourism increased fifteen-fold since 2000 and crested in 2015. However, the demand for tourism-related resources triggered changes in land use and land cover in distant resource-supplying areas. Such ULTs further contributed to unequal ecological exchanges. Our findings highlight the need for urban sustainability assessments to account for the impact of ULTs driven by urban tourism on distant resource-supplying areas. In addition, tourism planning and management should not be a facet but a core element of urban planning objectives.